This is all fine and dandy, but when it was discovered that it worked for porn site previews also, and that it could be easily accessed by kids, it caused quite a bit of concern among parents. Bing had noted on its blog how to use Smart Motion Previews in combination with its SafeSearch feature, but apparently it was still very easy for kids to view explicit adult content on its site. Yesterday Microsoft announced that it has made changes that will make it easier for parents to block and monitor what their kids are watching when they visit Bing.

"First, potentially explicit images and video content will now be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net. This is invisible to the end customer, but allows for filtering of that content by domain which makes it much easier for customers at all levels to block this content regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be. This makes it much easier for filtering software to block unwanted content if SafeSearch has been turned off.

In addition, Bing will begin returning source url information in the query string for images and video content so that companies who already use this method of filtering will be able to catch explicit content on Bing along with everything else they are already blocking for their customers." An example of such a query string is:

http://ts2.explicit.bing.net/images/thumbnail.aspx?q=974382499649&id=12ae77a7fed979b0502840bedacd2552&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.explicitsite.com%2fexplicit-picturegoeshere.jpg

CNET News reports "the company has reached out to more than 25 filtering and security vendors to work with them to provide a solution for filtering explicit content while using Bing".

While there are parental controls built into Vista and Mac OS X and software like Safe Eyes to keep kids from viewing porn online, ultimately it is the responsibility of the parents to impose rules and guidelines and to monitor their internet usage. It's also good to have discussions about what you consider is appropriate behavior online and to keep up with the latest trends and technology.

In the call we discussed the highlights of 2008: the top Web companies, the biggest technology trends - including an especially good conversation on open versus closed systems - and finally some predictions for 2009. We also touched on some of the 2008 in Review posts we've published in December:

• Top 100 Products of 2008
• Best LittleCo of 2008 & Most Promising for 2009
• Best BigCo of 2008: Apple

We look forward to doing more RWW Live shows in 2009!

Of course there are far more than 100 great Web products out there, so there are some excellent ones not included in our megalist. Please leave a comment here and tell us what we've missed!

• Best LittleCo of 2008 & Most Promising for 2009
• Best BigCo of 2008: Apple
• Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 International Products of 2008
• Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
• Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 Digital Lifestyle Products of 2008
• Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008
• Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008

Note that seven products made it to more than one of our top 10 lists, so we've noted when that is the case and added some new products that just missed the cut somewhere along the line.

ReadWriteWeb's Top 100 Products

This list is in alphabetical order, with category noted beside each item.

• Adobe AIR; Platforms
• Afrigator; International
• Amazon Web Services; Platforms & Enterprise *
• Android; Platforms & Digital Lifestyle *
• App Store (iPhone); Digital Lifestyle
• Basecamp; Enterprise
• BBC iPlayer; Digital Lifestyle
• BlueOrganizer (AdaptiveBlue); Semantic Web
• BooRah; Semantic Web
• Brightkite; Mobile Web; Most Promising for 2009
• ChaCha; Alternative Search Engines
• Chrome; runner-up Platforms
• Cooliris; Consumer & Alternative Search Engines
• Confluence (Atlassian); Enterprise
• Dapper; RSS/Syndication & MashupAds for Semantic Web *
• Digg; runner-up, Consumer
• DimDim; Enterprise
• Dopplr; International
• Facebook Platform; Platforms
• Faroo; Alternative Search Engines
• Feedburner; RSS/Syndication
• FFtoGo; Mobile Web
• Fire Eagle; Platforms
• Firefox; Consumer
• Flickr; runner-up Consumer
• Force.com (Salesforce); Enterprise
• FreshBooks; International
• FriendFeed; RSS/Syndication
• Fring; Mobile Web
• Gnip; RSS/Syndication
• Google Apps; Enterprise
• Google Maps; Mobile Web
• Google Reader; RSS/Syndication
• Google Reader RSS Subscriber Count Greasemonkey Script; RSS/Syndication
• Hakia; Semantic Web
• Hulu; Digital Lifestyle & Consumer *
• Imeem; runner-up Consumer
• IntenseDebate; Consumer
• iPhone SDK; Platforms
• i.TV; Mobile Web
• KallOut; Alternative Search Engines
• Kiva; Real World
• Kosmix; Alternative Search Engines
• Last.fm; Consumer
• LinkedIn; Enterprise
• Live Mesh; Platforms
• Maxthon; International
• Mednar; Alternative Search Engines
• Meebo; Consumer
• MindTouch Deki; Enterprise
• Mint; Real World
• Mixi; International
• Mogulus; Consumer
• Mozilla Weave; Platforms
• MySpace; runner-up Consumer
• Netbook; Digital Lifestyle
• Netflix; Digital Lifestyle
• Netvibes; International
• Ning; Consumer
• Nokia E71; Digital Lifestyle
• NYTimes iPhone App; Mobile Web
• OpenCongress; Real World
• OpenSocial; Platforms
• Open Calais; Semantic Web
• Opera Mini/Mobile; Mobile Web
• Pandora; Mobile Web
• PatientsLikeMe; Real World
• PlayStation 3; Digital Lifestyle
• PlanetEye; Real World
• Postrank (ex-AideRSS); RSS/Syndication
• Powerset; Semantic Web
• Qik; Consumer
• Quintura; Alternative Search Engines
• Remember The Milk; International
• Rudder; Real World
• SearchMonkey; Semantic Web
• SeeqPod; Alternative Search Engines
• Sermo; Real World
• Shazam; Mobile Web
• Snackr; RSS/Syndication
• Songbird; Digital Lifestyle
• Surf Canyon; Alternative Search Engines
• Taggalaxy.de; Alternative Search Engines
• TeachStreet; Real World
• Techmeme; runner-up RSS/Syndication
• TripIt; Semantic Web
• Twitter; Mobile Web & Consumer; Twitter API, Platforms *
• Twitterfeed; RSS/Syndication
• UpTake; Semantic Web
• UStream; runner-up Consumer
• Wii Fit; Digital Lifestyle
• Wild Apricot; Real World
• Wordpress; Enterprise
• Wuala; International
• Xing; International
• Yahoo! Pipes; RSS/Syndication
• Yapta; Real World
• YouTube; runner-up Consumer
• Zemanta; Semantic Web
• Zoho; Enterprise & International; Best LittleCo *

* products in more than one list. There were seven of these: Amazon Web Services, Android, Cooliris, Dapper, Hulu, Twitter, Zoho

• In 2004 Ludicorp, creators of Flickr, was named Best LittleCo and Feedburner Most Promising. Both of course have since been acquired (by Yahoo! and Google respectively).
• In 2005 37Signals was Best LittleCo and Memeorandum (now Techmeme) and Digg were joint Most Promising.
• In 2006 YouTube was Best LittleCo and Sharpcast Most Promising.
• In 2007 Twitter got Best BigCo and (in a bit of a break from tradition) we named "the open source movement" as most promising - a loose-knit group that aims to make a huge impact by tying all Web companies together. Last year we thought there was no single Web company that was more promising, and we have probably been proven right as our Best Web Platforms 2008 post showed (OpenSocial, Android, Mozilla Weave, Fire Eagle, ...).

Now let's find out who is ReadWriteWeb's Best LittleCo of 2008...

Best LittleCo of 2008: Zoho

We felt that Web Office vendor Zoho best represented the 'LittleCo' ethos this year, due to its David vs Goliath effort in competing head on with products from several very large companies: Microsoft Office, Google Apps, Salesforce.com's core CRM platform.

Zoho not only competed with these bigcos, they were innovative and scrappy about it. And in a year that will be remembered for the economic downturn, Zoho is a reminder to us all that we can work ourselves out of a down economy.

Zoho made two of our year-end Top 10 Products list - in the International category and in the Enterprise catagory. It is an Indian startup that offers a number of office tools, project management software and CRM solutions. It made serious advances with its office productivity suite during 2008, reaching a milestone of 1 million users in August this year.

Some of the specific highlights this year include: updating Writer at the beginning of 2008 to include support for the DocX file format, along with several other features; adding support for Visual Basic compatible macros to Zoho Sheet in April, then macro record and playback four months later; releasing a marketplace in September; Zoho Mail emerging from private beta in October, while offering offline support via Google Gears.

Our one note of caution with Zoho is that, as you can see from the above screenshot, it has so many products that it potentially spreads itself too thin. Some of its products show a lack of depth as a result - we focused on some of those issues in a post in September. So we're not claiming Zoho has the Web Office market cracked, just as Twitter had some issues last year when we chose it as our Best LittleCo. But overall, we applaud Zoho for its continued innovation and for competing effectively against the big guns!

After the jump, ReadWriteWeb's pick for Most Promising for 2009!

Most Promising Company of 2008: Brightkite

Again this was a tough choice. We were impressed with the potential of many apps this year. Open source music app SongBird, micro-lending service Kiva, online finance service Mint, health social network PatientsLikeMe - to name just some. However we ultimately came back to a type of application that made a breakthrough this year: Mobile Web. We named Apple Best BigCo of 2008 due to its iPhone platform, but we think there's still a lot of untapped potential in mobile. In particular no one company has yet broken through with a mobile-native social network. We think mobile social network Brightkite may become that app.

Brightkite was named in our Top 10 Mobile Web Apps of 2008, in which Sarah Perez explained that Brightkite includes an iPhone app, but it's much more than a toy for the exclusive club of iPhone owners. The service - a device agnostic, SMS-based application - lets you "check in" at various locations out in the real world and then see who else is there, has been there, and who is nearby. You can check in via text, web,or iPhone, but text is easiest if you're using a traditional cell phone.

While Brightkite hasn't been hugely successful yet in terms of numbers, we think it has a lot of potential. There's still some debate as to whether consumers really want new and separate social networks for the mobile phone. As we noted back in October, no other social network, including those specialized for mobile devices, had even reached 15% adoption. That means Brightkite and others like it still have a way to go before they become a solid part of the new mobile web.

However, if any of these apps have a chance for success, it's Brightkite. With the service's Twitter integration and live event niche, it offers something unique.

So there you have it: Zoho is our Best LittleCo of 2008 and Brightkite is our Most Promising for 2009. Agree? Or feel like arguing about it? We invite you to let your feelings known in the comments.

This is the second in our series of top products of 2008, the first can be found here:

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008

Note: the products listed below are in no particular order

1. Remember The Milk: Australia

Remember The Milk, the Australian startup that gave us our favorite task management tools, began when Omar Kilani, Emily Boyd and one stuffed monkey got together in 2004 with a simple idea. The idea grew and in 2005 they launched Remember The Milk.

RTM has seen enormous growth over the past couple of years. By October 2006, 100K people had signed up for the service, 200K by May 2007, 500K by March 2008, but it is only within the past year that RTM has had a significant impact on Web users globally. RTM now boasts over one million users, was named one of CNET's Webware 100 Award winners in April, and in May ReadWriteWeb readers chose RTM as one of their favorite Web apps. More recently RTM created a gadget for Gmail and an application for the iPhone, pushing its reach further still.

2. Afrigator: South Africa

Afrigator is a social media aggregator and directory for content from the African blogging community, similar in many ways to Technorati. Anyone in Africa with an RSS feed can use Afrigator to index their content and market it to the world.

Launched in April 2007 (alpha), Afrigator has seen a steady 25% month-on-month growth rate, launching beta in November of the same year. In September 2008 MIH Print Africa acquired a majority stake in Afrigator, giving the startup some breathing room to work on their new project Adgator, Africa's first ad network. Currently tracking 4159 blogs across the continent, Afrigator is a great place to find content from the "Afrosphere."

3. Zoho: India

Zoho is an Indian startup that offers a number of office tools, project management software and CRM solutions. It has made serious advances with its office productivity suite during 2008, reaching a milestone of 1 million users in August this year.

At the beginning of 2008, Zoho updated Writer to include support for the DocX file format along with several other features. In April, support for Visual Basic compatible macros was added to Zoho Sheet; macro record and playback rolled out four months later. October saw Zoho Mail emerge from private beta to being publicly available, offering at the same time offline support via Google Gears.

4. Netvibes: France

Members have created more than 50 million start pages spread across 200 countries on Netvibes since its launch in 2006. Available in 76 languages, Netvibes was named one of Times Best Web Sites 2007; but this hasn't dampened the team's enthusiasm to make Netvibes bigger and better, as evidenced by the launch of Netvibes Ginger in April 2008.

Ginger is a social version of NetVibes that allows you to share your new content from Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, blogs, etc. with friends; it also lets you follow the digital life of your friends. In November, Netvibes added a feature that allows content to be shared via integration with Facebook Connect and Twitter.

5. Dopplr: Finland / U.K.

Dopplr is a startup that lets you share travel plans with your friends, and "highlights coincidence," giving you a heads up of which friends will be in cities you plan to visit. While the company has only been around since 2007, it has big name backers, and according to Compete has shown significant growth.

Last month Dopplr launched its new city pages, which include creative commons images automatically imported from the 'interesting' tag on Flickr - to provide a visualization of visitor activity for cities within the Dopplr database. If you're not using it yet, you soon will be; we think Dopplr shows plenty of promise.

6. Maxthon: China

The browser market has seen many changes in 2008, with the introduction of Google's Chrome in September, Mozilla's Firefox 3 making the Guinness Book of World Records in June, and the slow decline of Internet Explorer as Firefox gains momentum. In Asia however, there's another browser making waves. Maxthon, according to European web metrics company Xiti, is creating problems for its main competitor Firefox. It comes as no surprise then, that Mozilla recently released an edition of Firefox specifically for China.

Maxthon is a browser created in China and reported to be the second most popular browser in China today. While it doesn't show up as a contender in most market share reports, it has had a staggering 174 million downloads at the time of writing this post. Using Internet Explorer's rendering engine, Maxthon has over 1,400 add-ons, proxy switching capability, aggressive ad blocking, split-screen browsing to name a few of its innovative features. We said it two years ago, and we'll say it again: this is one to keep your eye on.

7. Xing: Germany

LinkedIn has over 30 million members, and according to Compete a 179.6% year-to-year change that beats Xing's at 137.6%. It is important however, to note the financials, something we analyzed back in March this year, which may not be completely in LinkedIn's favor. The data of particular interest concerns user engagement; visitors to Xing stay an average of 43.4 minutes on the site, while visitors to LinkedIn stay an average of 7.8 minutes - a whopping difference of 456%. We think Xing has made some good choices this year, especially the recent hire of Stefan Gross-Selbeck, as reported over on ReadWriteWeb's Jobwire.

8. FreshBooks: Canada

FreshBooks, the Canadian online invoicing, time and expense tracking service for individuals and small companies, has been showing steady growth over the past year according to Compete, and claims to have over 500K new users since May 2004.

We compared FreshBooks with other online accounting services in August this year, and decided it was easy to use, includes a host of useful features, has an active forum, and offers benchmark data by industry to its users. More recently, we looked at FreshBooks Report Cards which provide an insight into how your business fares in relation to other businesses in your profession. Selected as one of the PICK 20 top Web 2.0 leaders in Canada in September this year, we think Freshbooks deserves a mention here too.

9. Mixi: Japan

Mixi, Japan's biggest social network (only available in Japanese) was previously known for its closed platform. No more. In August this year, Mixi announced that it is acting as an OpenID provider - therefore bringing the global OpenID to millions of Japanese users.

While Mixi is not acting as a relaying party yet, allowing users to login with OpenID from other networks, the functionality of Mixi user profiles has now increased dramatically. According to the blog Asiajin, this opening up is pretty radical for Mixi standards.

10. Wuala: Switzerland

Swiss startup Wuala offers an unusual online social storage system: it uses the disk space of other members' computers as part of the cloud. Wuala launched in August 2008 - making it the youngest of our international products.

Wuala differs from our other favorite online storage services in several ways. The advantages of this type of storage include no limits on file size and bandwidth. However the main disadvantage is that regardless of the AES-128 and RSA-2048 encryption, the idea of storing data on machines scattered around the world won't appeal to all. Still, with 28 million files uploaded as of writing and growing by the minute, Wuala is definitely worth watching.

So, do you think we've picked the best 10 International Products of 2008? Please let us know what you think about our choices in the comments. Most importantly, let us know which international products you think are worth tracking.

While Techmeme has it all covered when it comes finance and technology trends, product reviews are a rare treat. Here's where Tech NewsJunk steps in. The purpose of the aggregation site is to allow you to find out about products before they hit the big leagues. According to Winer's official post about the site's launch,

"A couple of notes. I'm not just interested in new products, I'm also interested in how the products evolve. So if Flickr were to (for example) add a bunch of new features tomorrow, we would defintely link to that.

I also want to hear about products from the people who design and implement them. Their point of view is very important to not only understanding their work, but to understanding the market."

Various Fixes For Your Addiction

As a frequent user of tools like FriendFeed and Twitter, it's no surprise that Winer has implemented numerous ways to keep up with Tech NewsJunk. You can:

• subscribe via RSS
• follow along on FriendFeed
• follow along on Twitter
• read mobile updates (iPhone or Blackberry
• refresh the site's page manually

Winer also has future plans to include the latest micro-blogging service darling identi.ca and roll out email updates.

Best Product Coverage

Thus far, Tech NewsJunk has decent product coverage from a host of great sites. The featured content ranges from internet apps to mobile technology. Winer also notes that ReadWriteWeb is one of the best sites to find product coverage and even extends some advice to us (we're listening Dave). As of this post, ReadWriteWeb is listed three times in the counts section, with two of our articles coming in at #2 and #3 respectively. All in all, Tech NewsJunk is a must have in anyone's feed reader.

Finding the right apartment to live in can be a daunting and time consuming task. Introin tries to make this process easier by creating a platform where prospective renters can communicate with current residents. Current residents can earn referral bonuses from their rental complex when they convince a prospective renter to move to their complex. Introit also gives renters the opportunity to advertise their own apartments for subleasing.

Introin currently only has listings available for the United States, but there, it does seem to have a relatively complete list of apartment complexes. What makes the site a lot less useful, though, is the fact that the search functions are extremely basic, to say the least. Other sites focused on the rental market like ForRent.com or Rent.com allow you to filter your search by everything from available fireplaces, to pools, and pet policies. Even Apartmentratings.com, which mostly focuses on reviews, allows for searching by number of beds and baths, as well as maximum rent.

Introin, on the other hand, only features a location based search and an option to search by name. That's it. After the search is completed, you are presented with an alphabetical list that can only be sorted by number of referrals. The information Introin displays about apartment complexes is about as spare as its search functions and doesn't go beyond name, address, and phone number. There are no photos, no links to a complex's web site, not even an indication about the cost of renting there. There is a button that says 'show details,' but it's inactive.

Connecting Renters

Even though the search presents a pretty bare list of information, this is the central hub for renters to connect. You can add your own information here to be listed as a referral and you can list your apartment as being available for sublease. At least in the sublease form, you can start entering some information about your place. You can not, however, upload any pictures.

Once a connection between renters has been made, the communication between them is then handled on the site on a message board. If there are no subleases or referrers available yet, you can set an alert and you will get an email once somebody else signs up for referring or subleasing.

Conflict of Interest?

If current renters, though, are mostly motivated by referral bonuses, the question remains if their opinions can be fully trusted. Many complexes offer bonuses close to $300 or a certain number of rent-free weeks. Introin doesn't feature any reputation system. This is problematic in a system that has a conflict of interest built into it by default.

What if Nobody Shows Up?

The problem for Introin right now isn't this potential conflict of interest, though. The problem Introin faces right now is one that many community sites face in its early stages: it's empty. In all my searches, I have yet to come across a single apartment available for sub-lease or a users who registered as a referral.

Introin is probably most useful in areas around college campuses where people move in and out on a regular basis and somebody is always looking to sub-lease apartments for the semester breaks or after dropping out of school. Here, however, Introin also faces stiff competition from long established local sites and, of course, Craigslist.

Verdict

Introin is build upon a very interesting idea. If the developers tackle some of the problems outlined above and start adding more information to the system so that the search function becomes more useful, then this service would have potential. Right now, there is simply a lack of activity on the site and the fact that the search is so limited reduces its usefulness to the point where it would be hard to refer anybody to the site with a clean conscience.

A Great Music Wiki

Sites like Last.fm, Imeem, Myspace, iLike, and more are limited when it comes to music. There's only so much information these sites give about music genres and music as a whole. Their only purpose is to promote material rather an educate the masses on other areas of music outside of just artists and the most popular songs out. WikiAudio does the exact opposite. There's a host of educational information about music and the production of it. The site offers a range of information about the jargon that only serious musicians would use and understand.

Conceived by Bill Turner and co-founded by Lathan Hodge, WikiAudio is essentially one enormous wiki on music. However, it's not about artist. The wiki's sole focus is the "art and science of anything audio or sound related". At WikiAudio you can learn about a new recording technique, build an API preamp from scratch, get tips on how to use features in music production software, and a host of other great things. Using the site is the same as using any other wiki. You just type in what you're looking for to get the information. Though it's necessary to sign-up in order to create or modify a new article or tutorial, registration wasn't necessary for browsing the site and accessing the majority of the site's features.

Education Meets Social Media

WikiAudio does a great job of combining both social networking and "Wiki" landscapes to create a hybrid that incorporates articles, videos, audio files, tutorials, user profiles, forums, blogs, RSS feeds, and more. Producers, musicians, and music majors will find WikiAudio to be a candy store full of free and useful sweets. There are plenty of tutorials available and veterans of audio production are encourage to help the beginners of the site by creating tutorials of their personal productions and techniques.

Swotti aggregates opinions about products from product review sites, forums and discussion boards, web sites and blogs, and then categorizes those reviews as to what feature or aspect of the product is being reviewed, tagging it accordingly, and then rating the review on as positive or negative.

Take the iPhone for example - each review is tagged with keywords like Design, Usability, Display, Reliability, Noise, Battery, Service, Camera, Keypad, Size, etc. Based on the number of positive reviews for a tag, a rating for that feature is given. Bar charts show green bars for good, yellow for average, or red for bad reviews. And they seem to be pretty accurate, at least for the iPhone - "design" is 5 green bars, "speed" is 3 red bars.

There is even a pie chart that summarizes the views. In the iPhone example, 15% said "I Love," 11% said "Too Expensive," 11% said "Worst." (Note to those who hated your iPhones: please send them this way.)

Product images display on the left and the reviews themselves, linked to the original source, display on the right. The reviews can also be sorted to display the best reviews, the worst, or the most relevant. Beneath the sorting options, the number of reviews display.

iPhone Results in Swotti

What's interesting is that this data seems to have been collected, tagged, and rated using only Swotti's technology. This isn't Mahalo - no user-intervention here - it's all automated.

One problem with the site seems to the be with the English spellings of things and wording, like "Adjective" was spelled "Adjetive." Since the site is also offered in Spanish, its likely that the Spanish version was created first and this is an English translation. However, this is only a minor drawback.

Whether it gets it right all the time - that's the real issue. The problems lies in similarly named products, obviously something that is still being sorted out. For example, a search for the Lenovo x300 also returned results for the Dell Latitude x300. I couldn't filter out the Dell results by using -dell in my query a la Google, as that returned a "No enough opinions" result (Yep, that's the English again).

Clicking on "Are you unsatisfied with your results? Help us" gave me a Spanish entry form which returned a bunch of code when I submitted my comments...although at the bottom it did say "Gracias por haber dado tu opinion," so maybe it went through anyway.

Altough these issues would have to be worked out for the site to became mainstream, it doesn't deduct from Swotti's potential - Swotti is reading, categorizing, and rating data from the web on its own. A great concept which hopefully will get better with time. Definitely worth watching.

But don't call Delver a "social search engine."

"That name belongs to services like Mahalo," says Liad Agmon, Delver CEO. "We prefer the term 'socially connected search engine'." That term makes sense because Delver is not a social network built around a search engine, but a search engine who indexes and queries your social network to deliver its results. Instead of just looking at a web site's popularity, Delver looks at information like whether your friends have tagged the site or if it's found on their social network profiles, bookmarking sites, photos and video sharing sites, or on their blogs. The results are more relevant because they account for who a person is and what they find valuable.

Agmon adds, "People want trusted information from their friends, but may not know who in their network is knowledgeable about a given topic. We make Web search more fun and meaningful by prioritizing results based on a user's network, while enabling the user to discover others in their extended network who share common interests."

Even without registering for an account, Delver will try to determine who you are by searching any public social network profiles you may have on sites like Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube. If you do decide to register on the site, though, you can then choose to associate your accounts with Delver in order to obtain even more accurate results. Delver currently indexes the entire web, and specifically indexes people's social connections on flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, hi5, facebook, Blogger, and, they are adding more all the time. When they go into public beta (circa May, 2008), an optional email import process will be provided as well.

Maximizing Your "Whole" Social Network

Many of us have friends, family members, or colleagues on sites like MySpace and facebook who aren't into using all the latest and greatest web apps and technologies. These friends may have a MySpace profile or a blog, but without visiting these sites directly, there was no way to gather information from these people before. Now with Delver, their profiles and contributions to your social graph are indexed.

No one has to sign up for Delver for you to have them included in your search results.

This is a real breakthrough since prior to Delver, the maximum value you would get out of social networks was directly related to how many of your friends would join. I don't know about you, but I still have plenty of friends who are on MySpace and nothing else, and are quite content with that. With each new social network I joined, the number of my non-tech friends that would follow me dwindled down to nearly nothing. Now it doesn't matter. They can stay on MySpace forever and yet the content they create there will be valuable to me.

Privacy Concerns?

It's important to understand that Delver doesn't display anything that isn't already publicly available. "If Google can get to it, so can Delver," says Agmon. But Delver just makes it so much easier to do so. You can access people's social information with such ease that anyone who hasn't been good about setting their profiles to "private" (or who doesn't know to do so), may be surprised to find themselves searchable on Delver.

Using Delver

After claiming your identity in Delver, your social graph is mapped and displayed for you beneath the Delver search box. Dotted lines connect you to your friends and your "friends of friends."

When you perform a query, results from all over your social web display.

You can narrow down your search to just display the people related to your search term or just media results by clicking the links at the top.

Each search result displays, via a  breadcrumb trail, your relationship to the person associated with that result. You can hover your mouse over their name to see their photo and their relationship to you. Even if you and them are not directly related as "friends" on a social network, you can still click the plus sign beneath their picture to add them as a connection. This will then add them into the mix of your search results in the future. This way, you can view the relevant bookmarks, links, blog posts, photos, and videos of people like you even if you don't know them personally...and they don't have to confirm the connection on their end.

Alternately, you can choose to exclude certain connections from your search results as well, which is perfect for eliminating those "who-is-that-guy?" friendships left over from your days of MySpace friend accumulation contests.

When Will It Arrive?

UPDATE: ReadWriteWeb has just received 50 beta accounts to Xobni. Enter the invite code “RWW” at www.xobni.com/download to get instant access to the download of Xobni Insight.

The Xobni software has several features, including fast email search, email analytics, automatic phone number discovery, threaded conversations, and more.

The email search is fast and begins finding the people and/or emails you're looking for as you type. A search for a contact will pull up their profile and every email where you two have corresponded...in 0.3 seconds!

A Xobni profile is created for every person you've emailed with and is displayed on the right side of Microsoft Outlook inside the Xobni sidebar. Each profile displays relationship statistics, contact information, related people, threaded conversations, shared attachments, and the author of the message you are currently looking at.

The relationship statistics show things like the time of day when you receive emails from the contact, the balance of incoming and outgoing messages, and the person's rank out of all of your contacts. These statistics are created by Xobni's powerful analytics engine, which can also be accessed from a menu option to further analyze your email habits with numbers, charts, and graphs.

A contact's phone number is displayed in the Xobni sidebar by automatically extracting that information from your emails. This way, you can see someone's phone number even if you've never actually entered them into your Outlook contacts. If you hover over the phone icon next to the number, you can see the text of the email from which their phone number was extracted.

Further down, the related people section shows other people who are connected to that person in some way, exposing your shared friends as well as your contacts relationships to each other. Clicking on the name of one of the "related people" will take you to their profile in the Xobni sidebar.

Beneath the related people pane, a recent conversations area shows your most recent previous correspondence with that contact. This can be very useful to help jog your memory when replying to a new email, as you can quickly recall what had already been said. It can also save you time because you never have to navigate away from the current conversation to locate previous emails. The conversations are listed by date, and by clicking on them, you can then view the emails themselves. You can also reply or forward one of those emails right in the Xobni sidebar, or you can choose to open the email in Outlook. Attachments they've sent you or you've sent them are underneath the conversations area, again saving you from having to navigate away from the current conversation to find the email with the attachment you need.

Xobni also helps with scheduling. It displays your appointments, schedule, and to-do list, and in the Xobni sidebar, there is a "Schedule Time" link below each contact. Clicking this link opens up a pre-composed email with your availability. This saves you time as you don't need to check your calendar every time you need to schedule a meeting. Xobni knows when you have an opening. Another interesting feature is that Xobni also automatically identifies people you've lost touch with by looking at the dates of your last correspondence with them.

Outlook is Only the Beginning

Although currently for Microsoft Outlook only, Xobni's blog hints that this may just be the beginning by calling Outlook "the first platform we’ve integrated with." They said they chose Outlook because it is used by 350 million people, but they also say that they "don’t want to force our users to change email clients or social networks to use Xobni. Our software seamlessly integrates with the environments and systems that you already use to communicate and build relationships." This makes me think that we will see integration with more platforms in the future.

Xobni's brilliance is in providing you with a true social network filled with information that can help you stay productive and get things done. It will never replace the fun of building a customized profile page on a social network like Facebook or MySpace, but it uncovers the network already present in what is perhaps the main area of your life where you communicate and build the most relationships. This makes Xobni not just useful, but one of those, "how did I ever live without it" kind of things.

Xobni is currently in an invite-only beta, but you can sign up to try it here.

UPDATE: ReadWriteWeb has just received 50 beta accounts to Xobni. Enter the invite code “RWW” at www.xobni.com/download to get instant access to the download of Xobni Insight.

Highlights this week: Richard MacManus ended 2007 with a review of the top 10 Web Tech stories of the year. Marshall Kirkpatrick produced an awesome toolkit to keep track of Web Tech trends in 2008; he also showed how to fall in love with tagging again and asked some big questions on privacy in the Web age. Josh Catone offered a guide to Online Giving to start the new year and he explored how the Web is affecting the US presidential primaries.

It was naturally a quiet news week, being the first week of 2008. But the Web had a significant part to play in the US Presidential primaries, which kicked off this week in Iowa. Josh Catone wrote pre-Iowa that if the web were an indicator of political results, then Ron Paul and Barack Obama would likely be squaring off in the US presidential elections next November. But with the first state contest out of the way, it looks like the web was only half right (any maybe didn't have much to do with it at all). Obama, who was in a statistical tie with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards according to pre-caucus polls, convincingly defeated his rivals. Paul, however, finished fifth - exactly where he was polling - and still no where near the winner, Mike Huckabee, who collected 34% of the vote to Paul's 10%.

Trends

What's Next on the Web: a ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008

This is a MUST READ post by Marshall Kirkpatrick, in which he outlines 5 big topical trends in Web Technology in 2008. He also provides the following resources:

* An OPML file of top blogs on each subject. This is a bundle of feeds you can import into your reader.
* A filtered RSS feed of just the most popular items regarding each topic (using AideRSS). Remember, whenever you subscribe to new RSS feeds - some of the magic won't be visible until you mark all the initial items as read and new ones come in again.
* A Custom Search Engine that you can bookmark and use to search inside the top news and reference sites regarding each topic.

5 Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again

Tagging content online is something that doesn't seem to have taken off the way some people expected it to.

Is it too complicated for widespread adoption? Is it too arbitrary to have the impact that formal taxonomies offer? Is it just too much work while you're zipping around the web? Who knows - what's important is that tagging web pages can still be very useful!

Marshall stopped using social bookmarking tools for a big part of 2007 because saving things for his own future reference wasn't enough motivation to invest the time required. In the latter half of the year, though, he's seen what some other people are doing to make it worthwhile again. Here's five and a half ways you can fall in love with tagging URLs again.

Related: The Glory, Bliss and How-to of Screen Scraping for RSS

Is it Time to Declare Music Downloads a Loss Leader?

Radiohead's widely heralded experiment with free downloads plus a premium package and request for donations (effectively) remains shrouded in mystery, but Trent Reznor and Saul Williams released some numbers this week about a similar experiment. Those numbers indicate that very few people want to pay for recorded music these days.

Related: Threatened by the Internet? Music Biz Should Rock Like Librarians

Web Products

Songbird To Build Out Music Power-Browser

Songbird is a desktop music player Marshall been using lately instead of iTunes and he's really been enjoying it. Based at core on Mozilla technology, this week the company kicked off a 6 week campaign to build the 40 most-requested Firefox extensions for Songbird. This big burst of functionality could put Songbird over the edge as a music-lover's dream-come-true, though it's pretty close already.

Author Uses Amazon Kindle to Beta Test New Book

In his former occupation as a programmer at Microsoft, Daniel Oran developed the "start" button for the Windows 95 taskbar. As an author about to publish his second novel, Oran continues to innovate, this time by using the recently released Amazon Kindle e-book reader to let early readers help him refine a draft of his latest book. Oran's use of the Kindle is one of the more interesting we've seen, and really demonstrates the device's read/write potential.

Related: Yahoo! PDF Ads In the Wild on Kevin Kelly's Latest Book

RWW Network Blogs

last100

On our Digital Lifestyle blog last100, the big news this week was Sony BMG’s decision to, in part, ditch DRM and start selling tracks on Amazon MP3 without copy-protection. That makes four out of four, with Sony BMG joining the other major labels: EMI, Universal Music and Warner (as predicted in last100's Digital Music 2007 year in review). In a follow up post, Daniel Langendorf asked where this leaves Apple’s iTunes Store?

On the Internet TV front, Netflix made a splash with its announcement of a partnership with LG to deliver movies over the Internet directly to a TV.

In their main feature-post this week titled ‘Mobile: the Year of Wireless hasn’t arrived — yet‘, last100's Dan Langendorf took a hard look at the changing face of the mobile industry (particularly in the U.S.), calling 2007 part of the transition years — with much bigger changes yet to come this year and realized in 2009.

AltSearchEngines

This week on AltSearchEngines, there were two interesting sets of posts: the first was a pair of very telling posts about vertical search engines. The message: verticals are no longer "gaining strength," they have now arrived.

Also this week ASE investigated ChaCha - with a review of ChaCha's mobile launch, followed by Natalya Murakhver's interview with ChaCha CEO Scott Jones.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.